Transplants

This last week I've been transplanting things - lovely garden beings - into the library garden beds as well as flowerbeds here at home. A couple of days ago I ran out of checks and scrounged purse and car for escaped coins to make up the cost of a couple of everbearing strawberries and a pot of coleus on sale. It felt so wonderfully good to have spent every penny on garden plants! I brought them home and set them with a few others in a semi-shade location, awaiting the right time for transplanting to the gardens.

I got the library plants in just before the pouring rains began. My home plants must now wait out the several days of predicted rains plus a day or two of ground-drying-out sunshine before they can become official members of my home gardens.

In the shade bed under a wonderful maple whose trunk reminds me of several lovely dancers moving close together as one, the jack-in-the-pulpits are up and blooming. They've increased in the last year. They seem not to have minded my digging and transplanting of hosta and spanish hyacinth and ferns. Perhaps jack-in-the-pulpits enjoy a congregation. A floral congregation.

I arrived home from a day-long meeting exhausted but ready to visit my gardens. Soon the rain began pouring down, so I went back inside - but couldn't rest until I'd put all my houseplants out in the showers for their spring baths. I have the sense that something good is about to happen. Clean showery plants always make my gardener's heart happy that way. Of course something good is about to happen! How not?

O, lovely cleansing showers, remove the house dust

from these green-blood brothers and sisters,

the ferns and aloes and sansevaria

and all the others -

we're cheering in the warming times now,

we're saluting the songs of morning birds

and praying with all our leaves and blossoms

for the world to awaken, renewed.